'Abstract Lakescape' by Luisa Millicent; watercolor
Many writers say they knew at a young age that they wanted to be a writer, the author of this memoir knew at a young age that she was meant to be a bookseller. Born Frymeta Idesa Frenkel in 1889 near Łódź, Poland, she was a child who loved getting books as gifts and for her sixteenth birthday she was allowed to order a bookcase of her own design to house her collection.
Balzac came dressed in red leather, Sienkiewicz in yellow morocco, Tolstoy in parchment, Reymont's Paysans clad in the fabric of an old peasant's neckerchief.
She went off to Paris to study arts at the Sorbonne, frequented the bouquinistes along the Seine, studied at the Bibliothèque Nationale and Sainte-Geneviève Library, and worked as an intern in a bookshop in Rue Gay-Lussac. She initially planned to open a bookshop in Poland specializing in French books, but there were already plenty of shops in the country that carried a good stock of French literature. But in Berlin that wasn't the case, so she explored the idea of opening a shop there instead. She wasn't given much encouragement, there was no demand for French literature in Germany right after WWI. But she persisted and La Maison du Livre opened in 1921 and became a center for French culture in the city. When authors such as Henri Barbusse, Colette, and André Gide passed through Berlin they would frequent and give talks at the bookshop.
Famous artists, celebrities, well-heeled women pore over the fashion magazines, speaking in hushed tones so as not to disturb the philosopher buried in his Pascal. Next to the window display, a poet leafs reverently through a handsome edition of Verlaine, a bespectacled scholar scrutinizes the catalogue of a bookshop specializing in the sciences, a high school teacher has gathered about him four grammar textbooks, solemnly comparing the chapters grappling with the agreement of participles followed by the infinitive.
In 1935 things started to change, police confiscated books and newspapers from the shop, the Nuremberg race laws came into effect, and paperwork to import books from France became onerous. The shop had a certain amount of protection from French publishers and government supporters, but Frenkel was looking around for someone to sell the shop to, as a Polish Jew she knew the danger she was in. In 1938 she sees that her beloved bookshop is 'redundant and out of place in Germany' and in August 1939 she leaves 'temporarily' for Paris thinking she will soon be able to travel to Poland and be reunited with her family.
In the days before the war broke out Paris was in a heightened state of emotion desperately hoping hostilities would be avoided and avid for any scrap of news or rumor.
The general public would wait outside the printers' to buy the papers, ink still wet from the presses. The crowd would jostle to snatch up any new issue; news vendors on their bicycles seemed to sprout wings as they flew down the street. People queued up in front of the newsstands well before the arrival of the newspaper couriers. Some would take several papers, of differing opinion, scour them feverishly on the spot, then pass them on to other readers.
For Frenkel the news of the invasion of Poland was deeply distressing and the distance separating her from her family, especially her mother, a constant torment. After nine months in Paris with the Nazis closing in on the city, she joins the exodus south after standing in interminable lines to get the required papers she must have as a foreigner. With a former professor friend from the Sorbonne they head to Avignon. From this point on the author moves from place to place in Southern France as does her luggage, most of the time in different directions; she copes with worsening political and material conditions and an increasingly dangerous atmosphere for a foreign, Jewish refugee under the Vichy regime.
The author shows how over a short period of time life changed in that part of France, her appreciative descriptions of the beauties of place contrast with the ugliness of what went on. A mediocre businessman blamed his failures on the Jews, but a young man trying to hand out racist propaganda on a bus is told to go back to Germany as other passengers laugh. The agricultural bounty of the region was requisitioned by the Germans while everyone else struggled to feed themselves. Close friendships quickly formed between complete strangers. Some people took advantage of the desperate situation the refugees were in and bilked them out of their last savings. In her own life during that time Frenkel saw much good and plenty of nasty, but she focuses more on the stories of those who helped her, and is usually quite understanding and tolerant towards individuals who didn't treat her well. However, she is critical of one particular group:
Police and gendarmes were on the hunt, displaying inexhaustible levels of skill and energy. They implemented the Vichy regulations strictly and inexorably. These subservient men harbored a violent anger accumulated in the wake of the defeat, and it was as if they wanted to take it out on those weaker, less fortunate than themselves. There was nothing heroic about these agents of authority, not their job nor their approach.
The final months in France were a series of close calls for Frenkel as she moved from hiding place to hiding place, and like other refugees she planned the best way to get out of the country.
This account was written in 1943-1944 before the war was over and was, as she says in her foreword, a way of bearing witness, but was probably also a way for her to process what she had just been through. One, perhaps surprising omission in the book is that there is no mention of her husband, Simon Raichenstein, a Russian Jew born in the Tsarist empire and in common with other refugees from a place with a no longer existing government, he could only get a Nansen passport. He had also studied in Paris, and the Raichensteins opened the bookshop in Berlin together, but he had to leave for France in 1933 because he was essentially without a country. Denied identity papers in France, early on he was rounded up and sent to Drancy and then to Auschwitz in 1942. When she wrote the book it's likely Frenkel didn't know his fate.
This book was published in 1945 in Geneva, but quickly sank out of sight. The publisher went out of business and very little is known of Frenkel's life after this account ends. A copy of the book was rediscovered in 2010 at a charity sale in Nice, was published to great acclaim in France with an evocative preface by Nobel prize winner Patrick Modiano, and then published in the UK and US in an excellent translation by Stephanie Smee.
It's a life and a book of two parts, the beginning is filled with much happiness and hope, the later years are a dark time, one of worry about distant family, what was happening in France, and her own fate. She varied her writing style depending on what she is writing about, the earlier pages describing her love of books, France, and the bookshop have something of the style of the classic French writers she loved, while terrible incidents and decrees, and the emotionally difficult situations that happened later are written in a stripped-down journalistic style. Written so soon after they took place the immediacy of the experiences comes through clearly and is all the more affecting because of the restraint she used in telling it.
(A Bookshop in Berlin: The Rediscovered Memoir of One Woman's Harrowing Escape from the Nazis, was translated from French by Stephanie Smee with background information researched and prepared by Frédéric Maria. It was published by Atria in 2019 and read for August's Women in Translation month.)
No comments:
Post a Comment